Levels of Human Connection
Three Things #61: March 26, 2023
Human connection excites me above all else. I find people endlessly fascinating, and my favorite hobby is meeting and forming connections with people, especially those with very different backgrounds and perspectives than my own. Quite often I think about how to form better connections: how to go deeper and share more, and how to build more trust, faster. A good place to start is thinking about the lifecycle and different types of human relationships. You can classify relationships by their depth, and relationships tend to progress through several stages. Here are the most important three stages as I see them.
Thing #1: Superficial Friendship
The vast majority of our relationships are superficial. This includes some of our family, most of our friends, and nearly all of our colleagues. Superficial relationships require the least investment of time and energy and are the least difficult to maintain. We’re on good terms with the people we consider superficial relations or, simply, “friends,” and we may even go out of our way to do favors for them. We may genuinely enjoy being with them and talking to them, but they’re not people we trust deeply. They’re not people we bare our souls to or go to in our time of real need. They’re people that we care about, but not people we’d drop everything for or go to the ends of the earth to help (if only for the fact that there are many of them and we can’t constantly be putting ourselves out for every single person we know in passing).
Superficial friends are people that we have at least something in common with and some affinity for. They’re relationships that we’ve invested some amount of time in, but not a lot. This category also includes relationships in transition: new friends we’ve just met but haven’t had the opportunity or the time to go deep with yet, old friends on their way to becoming close friends, as well as deeper connections that have faded with time and distance.
There’s a level of human relationship that’s even looser than “superficial”: these are our acquaintances, people we know online but not particularly well and not in person, and one-sided relationships where one party knows the other but not vice-versa. I’m not considering acquaintances for the purposes of this topic because I don’t consider those relationships especially interesting or meaningful.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with superficial relationships. By definition the vast majority of our relationships are superficial, because we simply cannot manage too many close relationships at any one time. Superficial relationships are the primary source of opportunities, professional and personal, because our network of superficial friends is large, broad, and diverse. We should always be cultivating new superficial relationships, as this is the “top of the funnel” for all of our meaningful human relationships.
Once in a while we’re given the opportunity to further develop a superficial relationship into something deeper and more meaningful, and something that’s more likely to stand the test of time and distance.
Thing #2: True Friendship
True, authentic friendship and connection with another human is rare. We’re lucky to have a handful of true, authentic friends in any given time and place. Having more than about ten is extraordinarily rare. There just aren’t that many people we vibe with on this level, which involves shared values, goals, and perspective. And these relationships aren’t easy to develop and maintain. We can be in touch with many acquaintances, perhaps hundreds, but maintaining more than a handful of close friendships is very difficult and consumes a lot of time and energy.
True friends are people we trust completely. They’re people we don’t feel shy about asking for help regardless of the circumstances, and they’re people we’d go out of our way to help—another reason you can’t have tons of close friends since you’d spend all of your time doing favors for them! They’re people who see the world much the same way we do. They share at least some of our core values. While arguably no two people have precisely the same value system, not even close friends or partners, it would be difficult to be close friends with someone with a very different or opposing set of values. True friends are people who enjoy at least some of the same activities and conversation topics that we do. Of course, they must also be different enough that we learn from each other and grow together! No one could be close friends with themselves.
Basically, close friends are the people we share our lives with. We open up to them and expect them to open up to us in return. We share our hopes, fears, and dreams with them. We genuinely want to see them succeed and will do everything in our power to make that a reality. As a dear friend of mine once put it, true friends are the currency of life. It’s critical that we invest deeply in building and maintaining these relationships because they will sustain us over time and get us through hardship.
While we must love and value these connections, we must also be prepared to let them go in their own time. In my experience, friends bubble up and down these tiers of friendship as we turn the pages and chapters of our lives. This is natural and it’s not something to be lamented. We should honor the dear friends who pass back into acquaintances, and we should celebrate and make space when we find that an acquaintance has become a closer friend. This ebb and flow is a normal, healthy part of life.
While close friends are the most important category and we share much with them, we don’t bare our souls to them completely. That degree of connection is reserved for the third and rarest category of connection.
Thing #3: Deep Connection
Some people, perhaps most, will go their entire lives without ever forming a truly deep connection with another person. I’ve been there only once or twice, and the times when it happened were brief, magical, and intense.
Human relationships can truly defy logic and expectation. One might naively expect that they observe a normal distribution, i.e., a bell curve: we have a solid relationship with most of our friends, with a few that skew stronger or weaker. But this isn’t actually how relationships work. Most relationships probably do fall somewhere within the realm of “normal,” but in fact some can skew far to the right, in a sort of black swan phenomenon. They can far exceed our expectations of what’s possible, and even our understanding of human connection. A powerful, deep connection can be orders of magnitude deeper and more impactful than even a close, trusted friendship.
Humans are complex creatures and the number of ways we can connect and relate to each other is almost unlimited. The deepest, most powerful relationships defy logic and don’t follow the rules. Relationships in this category don’t fit neatly into boxes (platonic friends, teacher-student, lovers, peers, etc.). They defy expectations in the same way that meditation, psychedelics, and other transcendental experiences defy expectations about the limits of reality, experience, and perception.
It’s unpredictable how and where such connections might arise. There’s obviously an element of serendipity, considering how rare they are. But I do believe that we can increase the odds through a form of cultivation. If the initial spark is there—if two people come together and share a deeper bond, a curiosity, an interest and a desire to go deeper together—then it’s possible to deepen that bond through a form of intentional relationship.
The basic idea of an intentional relationship is that you don’t leave things entirely to chance. Think about the people in your life: did you sit down with any of them and decide at any point what sort of relationship you intend to have, or how deep you intend to go? Did you decide how much you want to share with them, how much you want to trust them? Did you decide to trust them deeply in spite of not knowing them very well? Most people have never tried. I hadn’t until a few years ago. Of course you need a certain amount of chemistry, fertile soil, curiosity, and openness in the first place to have any chance of success. If it’s there, the sky’s the limit on how far and how deep you can go. Like any endeavor it depends on effort and trust.
But it’s also a lot of work, and it takes time. There are no shortcuts to building trust, and relationships are all about trust. Going really deep with someone else is like performing surgery on each other—and you want to really, really trust the person who’s going to open you up and move things around inside.
There’s more to share on this idea than can fit in this space. I’d like to write more on this subject based on my experiences as there’s woefully little material on intentional relationships. A good place to start is authentic relating. This sort of exercise—sitting down with another person, face to face, and repeatedly asking difficult, revealing questions—is a great way to break down barriers, build trust, and, most importantly, be vulnerable and reveal oneself. Facing challenge together helps too: working out, creating something together, travel to unfamiliar places, etc.
Deep, authentic, intentional connection is exceptionally rare and fragile but it’s the highest form of human connection and a peak experience. As someone who treasures human connection on every level above almost all else, the search for and cultivation of this level of connection has motivated many of my life choices. I encourage you to consider doing the same and to consider what you might be missing without it! Everyone is capable of getting there but it doesn’t happen by itself.